Tag Archives: Vault.com

Internships are in bloom – start cultivating yours now

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Interns are the bellmen of Corporate America. They open doors, fetch and carry items of value and may end up knowing how to get many things done. So how do you open the door to an internship this summer? And is it even too late to find one? Not a bit, especially if you are not seeking one of those major league internships at the Smithsonian or Google.

The high prestige ones sometimes have earlier deadlines than others – some expected to hear from candidates by December. Yet the largest number of internship job postings usually show up this month, according to Indeed, the big search engine.

Either way, it could pay to introduce yourself now and apply enthusiastically, or offer to serve as a stand-by in case their first picks decide to spend the summer in India.

Look now. Don’t delay your search or you’ll end up at the summer camp for the fifth year in a row.  March is the biggest month for internship job postings, and has been regularly since 2005, according to Indeed.com. (One year, in 2006 April had a higher number, but you can’t count on that happening again.)  Use your spring break time to search, as my Glassdoor blog suggested.

Look widely. Some employers are creating new internships this year, according to Internships.com . Some may add more interns to their plans if business continues to be strong, so be open to the new possibilities as well as the established internships.

Among the sites I’d recommend as resources for locating internships:  Indeed, which is so easy to use, LinkedIn, Vault.com, Facebook (corporate recruiting pages) and Twitter, where you’ll find HR directors and recruiters regularly sending out information. Also look at the employer website – many spell out details on their internship and may even give you the director’s bio or email. Check with local business development organizations and yes, your college career center. (At some colleges and universities, alumni or even anyone who has taken any classes will be welcomed in.)

Look professional. This means spending a few hours on your resume, and getting someone else to proof read it. Leave your rad T shirt and your bad attitude at home. It also means watching what you say on Twitter and all social media sites – employers check those before deciding whether to interview you. So do your own checking too:   Research both the employer and the hiring manager ahead of time. “Be the consummate professional,” Internships.com suggests in tips gleaned from employers on its site. If you’re not sure what that means, ask someone who has a vice president in their title or who hires a hundred people or more a year.

Here’s some more advice from Marriott’s university relations director Stacey Veden, who I profiled in the Washington Post Capital Business:

  • Head to the careers office and find out what employers are coming to campus in the next three or four weeks. Show up at their sessions. Ask questions. Be helpful. (At some colleges and universities, alumni or even anyone who has taken any classes will be welcomed in.)
  • Take initiative. With most internships claimed by juniors or seniors, start developing your skills with other work or volunteer work. Show your interest in the sector by finding a job in it, even if it’s a part-time job setting up for conventions or cleaning rooms on weekends.
  • Be flexible on what and where your internship is. Now is not the time to insist on a major city or a certain type of hotel.
  • Stay in touch with the recruiter. Tell her about your successes. Share your plans. Express hope for an internship next year if you don’t land one this year.

It’s about a positive attitude, professionalism and persistence, though having a professor or two squarely behind you certainly will help open internship doors too.

More resources:

Read more about competitive internships and how to get one in my Washington Post piece.

My new blog post on Glassdoor.com shows how to identify and land an internship with a startup.

Watch for Vault.com’s best internship lists, including one showing the most unusual internships and those with the best perks.

Indeed’s blog offers a few tips for an internship hunt, as well as many internship postings.

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Love your job or your co-worker – or maybe love the dogs, your best clients

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Everyone, it seems, loves something or someone at their job.
You read that right: Love is all around us during our work days, whether we acknowledge it or not. So if you do not want to read one of those sweet, sexy, seasonal Valentine’s Day Posts, skip this one and come back later in the week. Otherwise, read on for more on office love, trysts and sought-after jobs.
Despite layoffs, bigger workloads and grumpy bosses, more than half of American workers say they love their jobs, according to a Randstad online survey of 1,008 adults who have full- or part-time gigs. Two-thirds of them report it’s the work itself that makes their jobs wonderful. Those who hate their jobs are more divided on reasons: the job, the pay and their employer were all cited equally.
If you’re not feeling the love just yet, maybe these facts, gleaned from a variety of surveys and sources, will warm you up:

  • Four in ten people say they’ve experienced an office romance, according to an American Management Association survey of members. Almost one-third of them ended up married to their coworker. Another four in ten say their fling finished fast.
  • Almost a quarter of men say they’ve had an office fling compared to only 15 percent of women, according to Vault.com’s annual survey. I guess those ladies must be going into overtime on office romances.
  • Nearly one in ten workers currently have identified a colleague they’d like to date, the same amount who  asked out someone in the last year, according to CareerBuilder.com’s annual office romance survey.
  • Only about half of the AMA members polled say they have a written dating policy, and most forbid dating someone at a higher or lower level than you. One-fourth of those in the Vault survey say they dated someone below them at their organization, and almost one-in-five have dated a boss.
  • One-third of the 2,000 people who answered Vault’s poll say they’ve experienced a “romantic encounter” in the office. Whether this means a kiss in the copier room or something more erotic, we don’t know.
  • More than one-third of those who have a ‘work-spouse’ discuss their at-home sex lives with that person, according to a Captivate Networks Office Pulse survey.  Captivate’s survey of 600 also indicates that one-tenth of workers ended up in a romantic or sexual relationship with their ‘work-spouses.’
  • Jobs we’d most love to have:  Simply Hired says the top five clicked on job titles are administrative assistant, customer service representative, receptionist, project manager and material handler. The most searched keywords include part-time, internship and sales..
  • * Some jobs have love written into their descriptions. In the government’s Occupational Outlook Handbook, only a handful – veterinarians and animal care workers, counselors and psychologists – have love in their listing. Most require a love of animals.

The real message here:  Money doesn’t bring us love.  Pay may be a crucial reason to work, but it doesn’t mean we’re happier in our jobs. That comes from work we adore, a great friend at work, a dog at our feet or a lover in the next cubicle.

More:  Show your passion, and make your career sizzle. Advice from career coach Chandlee Bryan in my blog post on Glassdoor.com .

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Seven ways to stir up an “instant internship” this summer

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You graduated two weeks ago and you don’t know what you’re going to do with your life, much less the rest of the summer. Or you lost your job a year ago and you haven’t gone to a job interview in three months. Or the company you signed onto for the summer just filed for bankruptcy.
Quick – let’s heat up a summer job. It’s time to create an instant internship. That’s my term for an internship that is almost as easy to cook up as a barbecue for five friends.
This quick-made internship may not spring forth from the top tier law firms or at old-fashioned manufacturing companies struggling to keep its current workers in paychecks. And they may not pay as much as you think you’re worth – but they’re not volunteer work either. It is possible to develop an instant internship with a little ingenuity, luck and sales abilities. And it’s possible to take an internship even if you’re 33 or 57, especially if you’re changing careers or have been out of the workforce for a few years.
Here’s seven strategies for stirring up a short-term assignment in a hurry:

  • Search for successes. Look for organizations in your city that cannot keep up with demand. They are hot and they are in need of new staff. They may be in health care (see my article on healthy careers from the Washington Post) or mobile communications (such as those that develop advertising or specialized apps for our cell phones). Professional, scientific and technical employers are the most likely to hire this year, acccording to the Society for Human Resource Management, and that includes marketing and engineering firms and laboratories. Hint: Do some research on their products or service and growth plans so when you query them you’re already matching your talents to their success tracks or needs.
  • Drop out, drop in. Major companies choose their interns in February or March. So by June, a few have thought better of it – or found something better. When they drop out, you could fill in, suggests Mark Oldman, Vault.com co-founder said.  So contact the internship coordinator now and offer to serve as the relief pitcher- which after all is the one who often wins the game.
  • Go face to face.  Visit a half dozen organizations in a business park and introduce yourself as their problem-solving. high-energy intern (or other words that make you sound very appealing). Go mainly to smaller or mid-size employers and you could stumble upon a job before they’ve posted it, according to Richard Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute? books. This direct approach is one of his top 5 best job search strategies (you can see all five as they appeared in his book  “The Job-Hunters Survival Guide.” (Ten Speed Press, $9.99, 102 pages)  which was excerpted with a Washington Post article last year.
  • Get personal. Ask Dad and Aunt Sue or your neighbor whose yard you used to mow for work, or leads.  Family ties and personal connections were the No. 1 way this year’s college graduates expect to find jobs, according to a Monster.com survey. While you’re at it, find a family member or professional friend to promote you online. Ask them to send out your qualifications on Twitter’s Hire Friday or in a LinkedIn status or other posting.
  • Follow in a new executive. When a new CEO or CIO joins an organization, they want to put their stamp on the organization – and fast. So often they want their own team in place. If you time it right and write an excellent letter to that executive, you could come in as an executive assistant or intern to the chief. Vault’s Oldman told me about a similar strategy: Write a persuasive, personal letter to a half dozen senior executives offering to serve as their executive assistant / intern for the summer. Choose people in fields that interest you, then Google them. The letter must be customized to that person’s specific work and explain “why you’re excited to work with them,” Oldman told me. “It shows initiative.”
  • Seek a one-month assignment. Maybe this won’t be a summer-long internship but it could be a vacation relief or maternity leave replacement slot.  Offer to work the midnight shift; the dirty, undesirable clean-up job; the runner or the person who fields calls and customers who walk in. And take the job with a smile – and then come up with some ways to do it and something a little more meaningful too. You can find these directly or go to a temp firm, which is a field that’s been growing lately too.
  • Win the internship coordinator’s respect. Be personable, polite and persistent. Offer her help in recruiting for future internships. Offer to carry her boxes to the next recruiting fair in your region. Show a lot of interest. “If you’re on par with 10 other people, I’m going to see that person demonstrated their interest.  not one of 20 generic applications.  you’re putting your best self forward,” said the Smithsonian’s Tracie Spinale.  Even if you cannot land a summer internship, you’re putting yourself in place for one in the fall, when the competition is less fierce.

Some of these instant internships may take a week or three to work out. And some may pay less than the $17 an hour average pay for the college-student internship, as reported by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. (That average may be high because many of the better companies respond to NACE’s surveys.)

But most are ways to find “the hidden job market” of unadvertised possibilities and openings – where by some accounts more than half of all jobs are. Learn to succeed at that and anything they throw at you in your internship or the real jobs after it will be like mixing lemonade for your barbecue – sweet and cool.

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Get going now to get an internship

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Note: This post appeared originally on WorkingKind on April 1, 2009. The advice is still worthwhile so here it is for this year’s internship seekers:

If you – or your roommate, your daughter or son or nephew – are dragging their feet on going after a summer internship, here’s three good reasons to jump into one:

1. Interns often end up as the first people hired after the cutbacks stop.

2. Students who have had internships before are likely to earn more this summer, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

3. Interns this summer will earn more than last year – a 5 percent increase, according to NACE’s new research.  That means average pay of $15.93 to $18.26 an hour – much better than they’ll get at the  ice cream stand or amusement park.

The NACE research comes from surveys of 318 employers that are its members – they indicate that one-third of their college graduate hires last year were former interns. NACE contacts employers every year to ask about hiring prospects and pay – and its research gives a good benchmark for college hiring.

Yes, there are far fewer internship openings this year than in previous summers - NACE estimates a 21 percent reduction from the 2008 levelels. This reflects the lower workloads and layoffs that have claimed millions of full time jobs.

And yes, it’s late to get started on an internship search. But it’s not impossible. And many of those workplaces that laid people off in January may find by May or June that they’re short handed and need some extra help.

Here’s a Working item I wrote for the Washington Post in May 2007 that gives some smart advice on the last-minute internship:

College classes are winding down and summer internships heating up. Yet for some last minute lookers, it’s not too late to land an internship. Many organizations in and around Washington – - from the Consumer Electronics Association to Marvelous Market to some marketing firms- were advertising for for youthful talent and energy within the last week. And at some large corporations, which typically choose their interns in March or April, some inters will drop out at the last minute, leaving room for latecomers to slide in, said Mark Oldman, Vault.com’s co-founder. Vault publishes information on careers. That’s how Oldman ended up interning at MTV more than a decade ago while studying at Stanford University. “I was burning to work at MTV” with Downtown Julie Brown. Yet the music network didn’t choose him. Still, after classes ended, he called to see if there was any other work possibility, and the hiring manager told him that one intern hadn’t worked out and they wanted him to step in. “I was an internship junkie,” he said, completing six in college. Oldman, who is author of ” Vault’s Guide to Top Internships,” says finding a department head who hires her own interns – instead of relying on human resources managers – may be another door in if you’re running late. And he suggests the “create your own internship” plan. Identify nine or 10 intriguing people who are doing worthwhile or intruing work and write each one a personal letter offering to be their research assistant or intern. The letter must be customized to that person’s specific work and explain “why you’re excited to work with them.” “It shows initiative,” said Oldman, who notes that Vault still has internships to fill in New York.

-Vickie Elmer

So what are you waiting for? There’s still plenty of  time  and more than a few opportunities to find your summer internship.

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Here’s five new resources on landing a great internship this summer:

Note: I hold the copyright to my Washington Post articles and much of my other writing. If you’d like to republish a piece on your website, please contact me for details and rates.

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